Career Retrospective: Björn Lind

Now that it’s been essentially a decade since sprinting came to the WC scene in a big way, we’re going to start to see skiers retiring who have specialized in sprinting to increasing degrees. Lind is a good example of this trend, as I have 74 WC level sprint races and only 6 WC level distance races from him. And four of those distance races came in the Tour de Ski.

Lind certainly had a fair amount of success, particularly between 2002-2006, racking up 10 podiums, including an Olympic Gold in 2006:

As you can see, 2006 was his strongest season, supplying fully half of the podiums of his entire career. Indeed, of his ten WC level sprint races that season, his worst was 9th, and all but two saw him reaching the top five. Post-2006, Lind suddenly became considerably less consistent, although he could still certainly pull together a strong race or two.

If Lind had a technique preference, he didn’t show it very much in his results:

It looks like Lind had a bit of an imbalance in 2006 towards skating, but there’s actually a classic victory in there that’s hard to see because several dots are being plotted nearly on top of each other.